Bob Dylan

Chrissie Hynde sings Bob Dylan and Shannon McNally performs songs associated with country singer Waylon Jennings. They both use the structures the men built to create their own rich emotional spaces.

Critic Ken Tucker selects his top albums of the year.

Nelson, now 86, spoke to Fresh Air in 1996 and again in 2006 about music and why he never quite fit in as a country star. Plus, Ken Tucker reviews Nelson's new album, Ride Me Back Home.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new three-and-a-half-hour documentary about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home by director Martin Scorsese. It's available on a two-disc DVD and will be shown on PBS as part of the American Masters series.

Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says Dylan both infuses the songs with his personality, while also allowing them to be heard anew.

During a hiatus, some tapes surfaced of new songs Bob Dylan had been writing: the Basement Tapes. These songs have been collected in a box set.

Suze Rotolo, who strongly influenced Bob Dylan's songwriting and walked beside him on the album cover for The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, died of lung cancer on Friday. She was 67. Fresh Air remembers Dylan's muse with excerpts from a 2008 interview.

In the Oct. 18 issue of The New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz argues that the rhetoric expressed by both Glenn Beck and the Tea Party is nothing new -- and is rooted in an extremist ideology that has been around since the Cold War.

The news that Bob Dylan was making a Christmas album came as a surprise. Now that Christmas In The Heart has been released, with the announcement that all profits will go to charity, it's caused even more consternation, with commentators divided as to whether it's an earnest effort or one big put-down. Rock critic Ken Tucker offers his opinion.